'Voyager' actors Ethan Phillips, Tim Russ, Garrett Wang, Robert Duncan McNeill, guest star Tom Wright, and writer Lisa Klink talked "Tuvix" at Trek Talks 3.
Yeah, he was largely operating in safe space and still made some unethical decisions.
Janeway was willing to make the hard calls that would best serve her ship and it’s future, having your cook and your third in command get fused isn’t exactly going to result in a functioning chain of command.
Plus since the operation could be reversed, you could argue that Tuvok and Neelix aren’t actually dead, merely suspended animation like storing people in a transporter buffer. You’re still killing Tuvix, but sacrificing one to save two is “the needs of the many” in it’s most simplistic form even without the added weight of hundreds of lives depending on Tuvok’s leadership and tactical skills.
I never once considered Janeway to be out of line given her circumstances. The crew always comes first even at the cost of her own humanity and ethics. She’s a good captain, willing to make the call that ends lives and live with it so that others may not have to endure those decisions and consequences. She didn’t ask anyone else to do that for her.
I mean, DS9 was almost as much in the boonies as Voyager. Assistance was limited, and there were limitations on what he could do, as he was only running the station at the behest of the Bajoran government, not as a true representative of the Federation.
It also introduced facets of war, even before it became a full blown thing in the later seasons. He wasn’t always on the side of the angels… because there are no angels in war. War only ever makes demons.
It doesn’t excuse his actions, but it doesn’t make them truly inexcusable either. They both operated in much more of a grey area than either of the two previous series.
Bajoran space was far away but not impossibly so from Federation resources, I’m not trying to say he’s a bad Captain, merely that the comparison to Janeway is a complete farce. If we are being fair they both fail to uphold the federation’s ideals.
If we are being reasonable, they both did what they had to do in order to save lives and get the job done.
My issue is the constant Trekky tendency to pretend Janeway is a shit bag and Sisko is somehow better, it’s just bias.
Yeah fuck Tuvix, and the Philosophy 101 bullshit. Two people were the victim of an orchid-related technology malfunction. Plus, I don’t hear people making the same argument about Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
Exactly, had they not reversed the malfunction Janeway could be considered to have killed two of her crew. That somehow never gets brought up in the philosophy discussions surrounding the episode. Refusal to act when a solution exists makes her complicit in dual homicide.
Plus! After that one episode in TNG where they de-age replacement Crusher, we have no reason to believe transporters can’t solve literally all of these issues including death. For those not in the know, since the transporter has the last time someone energized stored in their memory banks it can simply reconstruct them as they were. A literal backup snapshot of the person.
Once that episode airs, all bets are completely off. I mean seriously, you could fix someone getting their head blown off by just transporting them but altering the image to correct for their last time leaving the ship. Death? Fixed. Wounds? Fixed. You can literally pull their backups and reconstruct at any time you want.
It’s foolish to think this is even a conundrum given that slip up, just duplicate and separate, keep all three. If transporters are really making matter out of energy it shouldn’t matter if there’s three people’s worth of matter, just use more energy.
Yeah it’s basically just a Trolley Problem scenario. Two people were laying on the trolley’s current track and would have been killed if she refused to pull the lever. She pulled the lever, diverted the trolley, and killed one person laying on the second track to save the two laying on the primary track.
Sure, the philosophy people could argue that she was murdering the one by acting. But if she has the opportunity to act and refuses to do so, many more would argue that she was complicit in murdering the two. She made a choice and knew she’d have to live with it.
Neither side is more “right” than the other. That’s kind of the whole point of the trolley problem.
True. Then you are removed and replaced by someone who does what you won’t.
It’s tricky. I think its also important to weigh in that a lot of these captains and folks in executive position spent their entire working life to get to X position. It must be hard to walk away from a life goal, which I assume is what pushes them to, “do what needs to be done.” The lingering question remaining, “Did it really need to he done?”
The whole theme of the show is the battle of the ideals which work great in the alpha quadrant vs the reality of their situation
That actually makes Sisko sound so much worse.
Yeah, he was largely operating in safe space and still made some unethical decisions.
Janeway was willing to make the hard calls that would best serve her ship and it’s future, having your cook and your third in command get fused isn’t exactly going to result in a functioning chain of command.
Plus since the operation could be reversed, you could argue that Tuvok and Neelix aren’t actually dead, merely suspended animation like storing people in a transporter buffer. You’re still killing Tuvix, but sacrificing one to save two is “the needs of the many” in it’s most simplistic form even without the added weight of hundreds of lives depending on Tuvok’s leadership and tactical skills.
I never once considered Janeway to be out of line given her circumstances. The crew always comes first even at the cost of her own humanity and ethics. She’s a good captain, willing to make the call that ends lives and live with it so that others may not have to endure those decisions and consequences. She didn’t ask anyone else to do that for her.
I mean, DS9 was almost as much in the boonies as Voyager. Assistance was limited, and there were limitations on what he could do, as he was only running the station at the behest of the Bajoran government, not as a true representative of the Federation.
It also introduced facets of war, even before it became a full blown thing in the later seasons. He wasn’t always on the side of the angels… because there are no angels in war. War only ever makes demons.
It doesn’t excuse his actions, but it doesn’t make them truly inexcusable either. They both operated in much more of a grey area than either of the two previous series.
Bajoran space was far away but not impossibly so from Federation resources, I’m not trying to say he’s a bad Captain, merely that the comparison to Janeway is a complete farce. If we are being fair they both fail to uphold the federation’s ideals.
If we are being reasonable, they both did what they had to do in order to save lives and get the job done.
My issue is the constant Trekky tendency to pretend Janeway is a shit bag and Sisko is somehow better, it’s just bias.
Yeah fuck Tuvix, and the Philosophy 101 bullshit. Two people were the victim of an orchid-related technology malfunction. Plus, I don’t hear people making the same argument about Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
Exactly, had they not reversed the malfunction Janeway could be considered to have killed two of her crew. That somehow never gets brought up in the philosophy discussions surrounding the episode. Refusal to act when a solution exists makes her complicit in dual homicide.
Plus! After that one episode in TNG where they de-age replacement Crusher, we have no reason to believe transporters can’t solve literally all of these issues including death. For those not in the know, since the transporter has the last time someone energized stored in their memory banks it can simply reconstruct them as they were. A literal backup snapshot of the person.
Once that episode airs, all bets are completely off. I mean seriously, you could fix someone getting their head blown off by just transporting them but altering the image to correct for their last time leaving the ship. Death? Fixed. Wounds? Fixed. You can literally pull their backups and reconstruct at any time you want.
It’s foolish to think this is even a conundrum given that slip up, just duplicate and separate, keep all three. If transporters are really making matter out of energy it shouldn’t matter if there’s three people’s worth of matter, just use more energy.
Yeah it’s basically just a Trolley Problem scenario. Two people were laying on the trolley’s current track and would have been killed if she refused to pull the lever. She pulled the lever, diverted the trolley, and killed one person laying on the second track to save the two laying on the primary track.
Sure, the philosophy people could argue that she was murdering the one by acting. But if she has the opportunity to act and refuses to do so, many more would argue that she was complicit in murdering the two. She made a choice and knew she’d have to live with it.
Neither side is more “right” than the other. That’s kind of the whole point of the trolley problem.
If you abandon your principles when things get hard then they’re not principles; they’re hobbies.
True. Then you are removed and replaced by someone who does what you won’t.
It’s tricky. I think its also important to weigh in that a lot of these captains and folks in executive position spent their entire working life to get to X position. It must be hard to walk away from a life goal, which I assume is what pushes them to, “do what needs to be done.” The lingering question remaining, “Did it really need to he done?”